During the euro area (EA) sovereign debt crisis, lenders in financial markets raised default risk premiums on sovereign bonds issued by countries that were then consid-ered too risky. Among some of these countries (especially Greece), fiscal policy had not been implemented according to good...

This paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 pandemic and monetary policy measures adopted by the European Central Bank (ECB) on the sovereign risk for the European Monetary Union (EMU) countries for the period between March-2020 and November-2020 using daily data. The impact of Covid-19 and...

The 2008 Global financial crisis and the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis deteriorated banks funding conditions and lead to a substitution effect among bond instruments. We examine the pricing of straight, covered and securitization bonds issued by European banks in the 2000-2016...

This paper examines the recent behavior of sovereign interest rates in the euro area, focusing on the 10 year yield spreads relative to Germany for Italy and other euro area countries. Both previous analyses and the new evidence presented in the paper suggest that, in recent months, for several...

On 5-6 September 2012 SUERF held its 30th Colloquium "States, Banks, and the Financing of the Economy" at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium. All the chapters in this publication discuss from different...

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 crystallized the underlying imbalances that are currently acting to tear apart the Euro area monetary and fiscal systems by focusing markets and public attention on the core cause of the overall Euro crisis, the insolvency of the Euro area member-states...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

This paper qualifies the view of pronounced overpricing of sovereign bonds for the so-called GIIPS countries during the financial crisis. We use annual data for 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2012. As opposed to related studies, our data set allows us to contrast the pricing of macroeconomic...

This paper studies the behavior of sovereign spreads of countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and their apparent disconnection with country-specific fundamentals before the 2008- 2013 debt crisis. We test three characteristics of spreads: i) a change in the level of spreads, ii) a weak...